


market value

by Ruriruri



Category: KISS (US Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 08:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17158250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruriruri/pseuds/Ruriruri
Summary: Twenty black t-shirts from the dime store. Four handmade stencils. Two yards of silver vinyl. Two pairs of fabric scissors. Gene dumped all these wares unceremoniously on his bed and bandmate, who blinked at him with all the vagueness of a dog with cataracts. Ace and Gene make the first t-shirts for the not-yet-created KISS Army.





	market value

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KittieMitties](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittieMitties/gifts).



> To KittieMitties. Merry Christmas!! Thank you for all the lovely KISS fanart and photos you’ve shared and for being super-fun to talk to, it’s been so wonderful!

Twenty black t-shirts from the dime store. Four handmade stencils. Two yards of silver vinyl. Two pairs of fabric scissors. Gene dumped all these wares unceremoniously on his bed and bandmate, who blinked at him with all the vagueness of a dog with cataracts.

“What’re these for?”

“These,” Gene said, “are for promotion.”

“Promotion? Gene, my mom’s not gonna make us all clothes…” Ace picked up the scissors, frowning and poking at the blades. 

“She’s not. We are.” Gene took the other pair. “Remember what we were talking about last practice? Doing the KISS kits? The flyers, the mailing list?”

Ace nodded blearily.

“Well, this is just part of the package. T-shirts.” Gene picked up a stencil. Apparently, he was either still in teacher mode, or else he was just operating under the suspicion that Ace was loaded even at four on a Wednesday afternoon, because he proceeded to explain. “I made some stencils out of the logo you did. So we’ll just cut the letters out of the vinyl and—"

“Iron ’em to the t-shirts, I get it.” Ace nodded again. “Like we’re a bowling team.”

“No, not like a bowling team. We have to start from the ground up here, Ace.”

“Why didn’t you get Paul and Peter for this?”

Gene grinned almost predatorily, moved the vinyl, and sat down beside Ace on the bed.

“I did. They have the other twenty shirts.”

“Damn.” Ace’s face scrunched up into an expression Gene was already beginning to recognize. It was the same expression he wore when asked to carry band equipment. Gene put a hand to his forehead, already prepared for a litany of lousy excuses—except they didn’t come. “All right.”

“All right? You’ll do it?”

“Yeah.” Ace reached over, grabbing the vinyl, folding it neatly in half, and cutting it on the crease, handing one half to Gene. “Shit, never thought I’d be doing this kinda thing outside of art class.”

“You took art?”

“Well, yeah. Didn’t you?”

There weren’t too many classes Gene hadn’t taken in high school. Not too many extracurriculars, either. That had set him apart from the other guys in every single band he’d ever been in, KISS included. Their drive to excel had really only ever been for music—his was for everything.

He thought that might make the difference, might be the exact lynchpin they needed as a band. His time at Vogue had been useful, really useful, both for using their old mimeograph in the back for KISS stuff and for teaching him a little more about the art of advertisement. They had the look and the sound—what they needed was the press. Vogue operated on the pretense of those self-assured cover models, beautiful, rail-thin blondes wearing what those fashion houses thought was _now_. Some of it even Gene thought was a little ridiculous, but that was okay. It was the girls that sold it, the girls with all their confidence, staring sultry on page after page, wearing the paisley and plaid as if they were million-dollar furs. KISS could learn from that. If they could project a larger-than-life image, the publicity would follow. And from there the gigs, and from there the record deal, and from there… from there success. Sometimes after work he could taste it, sugary sweet in his mouth. Almost there. Almost.

Gene realized abruptly Ace was still waiting on his answer, was actually waving his hand in his face, and he managed to nod.

“Yeah. Yeah, I took art.” His foot was on one of his homemade comic fanzines. He didn’t bother sliding it under the bed. 

“Figured. I always liked that class. I remember one time the teacher had us do this dotting shit.”

“Stippling?”

“Yeah. We took headshots of ourselves, developed them, then we went off that to make the drawing. Must’ve run three pens out of ink doing all those fucking dots.” Ace laughed and took the “K” stencil, starting to cut it out of the vinyl. “But I had a real nice picture of half my face there.”

“Just half?”

“I never finished it.” He was being careful, Gene noticed, lining up the stencil as close to the edge as he could each time he started to cut out another letter. Trying to save as much of the vinyl as possible. “You need, what, twenty, right? I’ll just do all the Ks right here.”

“How come you never finished it?”

“Got boring.” Ace paused. “We worked on those pieces for like a week. Way too long to bother.”

Gene started to cut around the “I” stencil, belatedly realizing he should have brought along some pins, too—the vinyl was a bit slippery, harder to hold in place than he’d counted on, especially without a surface to bear down on. Not that his desk would’ve worked, covered up as it was with papers, clothes, and the remnants of yesterday’s lunch, complete with a half-empty soda bottle. Still, the vinyl letters he was ending up with were more than serviceable so far.

“Are you always like that?”

“Like what?”

“Quitting when something gets boring.” It came out more bluntly than he quite meant it to, but Ace didn’t seem offended, cutting out more of the letters and putting them in a neat pile on top of the t-shirts. The silver Ks caught the dim florescent light, glimmering just a bit.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Aw, geez, I dunno. Don’t have much of an attention span.” Ace shrugged. “What about you? Bet you never quit anything, huh, Gene?”

“Nope. Can’t afford to.” Gene shifted on the bed, causing a two-foot pile of clothes and comics and lesson plans to scatter onto the floor. He bent over to pick them up, but Ace was already there, rifling through the mess even as he gathered it up.

“‘The Amazing Spider-Man’? Really, man? How many issues is this? I knew you liked comics, but shit, this is kinda overboard.”

“They’re great.” Gene took the comics, straightening the stack before putting them right back on the bed, leaving Ace with the rest of the paraphernalia. There were doodles in the margins of almost every lesson plan like deranged, uneven borders. A rather loving sketch of Superman, cleft chin and all, an even more loving sketch of a woman’s naked torso… all of which made a terrifying contrast to the outline on one-step equations. “They’re not like when we were kids, they’ve gotten more complex.”

“Really? ’Cause it looks like Spider-Man’s still fighting the Green Goblin.” Ace tried to fork over the lesson plans and clothes, but Gene just raised a hand.

“You can just put those on the floor.” He said it as if there was any floorspace to speak of.

“Your ma’s way too easygoing with you…” Ace finally set them down on top of another pile of books. “And I thought I was bad! Fucking fire hazard in here.”

“You should see the closet.” 

“Might eat me. I dunno. You think closets eat aliens, or are they more into humans?”

“It hasn’t eaten me yet.”

“No good. I know they ain’t eating demons.”

Fifteen Is done. Five left. Gene glanced over to check on Ace’s work—surprisingly, he’d already moved on to the lightning-shaped Ss, stacking them up next to the Ks. It was kind of odd, watching him. Gene hadn’t thought Ace was quick at anything that didn’t involve the guitar. It was like that innate lazy distractibility permeated everything else he did. The few times he’d brought food from home to practice, or Paul had nicked sandwiches from the deli (Peter had brought brownies once that Gene was pretty sure were laced with marijuana), Ace had eaten practically like he wasn’t sure what food was, a gnaw here and a nibble there, rambling amiably about chord changes and reworking solos while Gene wondered if he could just ask for his sandwich. From the mildly pained look on Paul’s face, Gene could tell he was thinking the exact same thing.

All twenty Is done. He got the other S stencil and started to cut it out as Ace meandered.

“You think if we get big, someone’ll ever want these shirts? Like a collector’s item?”

“Oh, yeah.” Gene grinned. “Maybe we should keep two each.”

“Two?”

“Well, we’ll all be wearing one.”

“C’mon, Gene, after all the work we did just making the outfits, we can’t go onstage in t-shirts like hippies—” 

“For promotion. Just promotion. We’ll take some pictures wearing these and—look, the whole point of KISS is not to go out there in t—aw, shit—” He’d cut himself with the scissors. Not just a tiny nick, either. A quickly-thickening streak of red was trailing straight down the middle of his index finger, staining the silver vinyl, too. He tossed that aside before he could ruin it, started to get up, but Ace grabbed his wrist.

“Hang on, I got you covered.”

“We’ve got bandaids in the bathroom.” Of course, it still probably meant a couple days of crappy playing, but they didn’t have any gigs, and it was just his left hand. Gene almost told Ace that, but Ace was looking at him in an eerily intent way that made him shut his mouth.

“This is better. Trust me.” Ace lifted his wrist, leaning his face in, inching it closer, closer. Gene started to tug his hand back, but it was slow. Token. Like he was dragging it through water instead of air. It wasn’t nearly enough to keep Ace’s lips from meeting his callused finger, and his tongue from lapping up the blood. Eagerly, downright eagerly, sliding his mouth all the way around his finger, sucking hard. Gene could feel his face go pink, then vibrant red, until finally, he yanked his finger out of Ace’s mouth. Ace just tilted his head up, grinning broadly.

“Should be good now. Jendell spit cures everything but hangovers.” And then, as if nothing had happened, he went back to the vinyl. “Hey, I think we got enough of this left over, if you wanna add some designs, maybe stars or some shit…”

Gene wiped his hand off on his sleeve, still too startled to say a word yet. Ace’s nonchalance just made it worse, but the minute he was about to ask what the hell Ace had done it for, he glanced down at his sleeve. Still wet with spit, sure, but there wasn’t a drop of blood on it. Not on his finger, either. Not a mark on it. It didn’t even hurt.

Shit.

Holy shit.

The rest of the afternoon, Ace chatted affably about KISS plans and new songs (he had a chorus in mind but no verses, something about a parasite) while Gene ironed on the vinyl letters and tried to nod along. He headed off after the t-shirts were done, leaving Gene with the entire neatly-folded pile, a still-flushed face, and a question he wasn’t sure he ever wanted the answer to.


End file.
